Taking Back America: A Portion Of An Original Work

June 2012 St. Louis, Mo. A string of burglaries and home rapes committed in and around the adjoining area have made a community on the outskirts of St. Louis paranoid to the point of panic. People have formed neighborhood watch programs and visited with the local law enforcement many times. Fear is slowly taking control of those who live nearby and the level of anxiety risen to new heights and has permeated the upper levels of those assigned to protect the populous. The perpetrators have yet to be identified, let alone caught. The police have run out of options, and they are about to run out of time. On a dark night in a quiet, decent middle class neighborhood, a trio of burglars makes ready to invade Mark and Melinda Wagner’s home. Unknown to those about to “visit” Mark has recently purchased a 12 Gauge shotgun specifically for home protection. He has it loaded to the hilt with 00 buck shot and it stands near his bed. Somewhere around 2:00 in the morning, he awakens to a sound somewhere in the house; he is not sure what he hears, but he knows it is a sound that is out of place in his home at that time of night. Mark gets out of bed, and grabs his gun, checking to make sure there is a round in the chamber. Easing down the darkened hallway, he stops on the landing when he hears whispering in the downstairs living room. He shouts out, “You better get the hell outta here! I’ve got a gun, and I will use it!” He hears soft, threatening laughter coming from the bottom of the stairs, then a harsh voice in the dark answers “You better use it on yourself, fella, and save us the trouble! But be nice and leave your old lady; we got other plans for her!” He hears more laughter, and Mark realizes it comes from more than just one person. He hears steps approaching the bottom of the stairs. Shaking, he readies the shotgun, and aims it down the stairs. When he sees a shadow begin climbing up, he yells at the top of his lungs and pulls the trigger. As fast as he can, he pumps another shell into the chamber, and takes aim at the next in line. As he shoots again, he hears the third person running through the house for the door. Mark screams for his wife to call the police while he stands guard at the top of the stairs.

When the police arrive, they find one dead and one severely injured person at the bottom of the stairs. They arrest the survivor, place the plastic cuffs on him, and send him off to the local hospital. The county coroner takes care of the remaining thug. The police assure Mark he did exactly the right thing, and nothing more is thought of it. At least, not at that point in time.

Three weeks later, Mark answers the door to a deputy sheriff. The deputy advises Mark he is being served papers. Bewildered, Mark accepts the document, and returns to his study to open and read it. Unbelievably, the surviving burglar has filed a law suit against Mark for attempted murder! As he reads the paperwork, he has a sick feeling develop in his guts, and some sense deep within is telling him there is no way this can be happening, not to him. But it is.

On the day of the trial, the burglar, dressed up and looking every bit a victim himself, is wheeled into the courtroom. His attorney, a sleazy, well known defense lawyer, makes an impassioned speech about three boys out for a night of fun; that had too much to drink and mistakenly entered the wrong home. Apparently, they were given the address by some girls who were looking to party, and had told the boys to “come on in, if the door’s shut. We’ll be waiting upstairs for you.”

The trial took the better part of two weeks, and the outcome, while sick and ridiculous, was not all that out of the norm in the America of today. The homeowner, a life-long native of the area, with a solid reputation and ties to the community, was found guilty of attempted murder. The jury found that he failed to properly identify himself before opening fire on “unarmed” boys. Sentenced to 15 years to life, he could only sob uncontrollably as he was led out of the courtroom to begin his sentence.

In Vermont, the outgoing Governor took the opportunity to pardon several inmates for their crimes. Among them was a three time DUI offender who was actually out on bail for a fourth DUI which resulted in the death of a young mother and her 2 year old son. While awaiting trial for this crime, the Governor pardoned him for his previous DUI, for which he was actually paroled the month before. The newly pardoned man took the opportunity to celebrate his good fortune by going to a bar and getting drunk. As he left the bar, he drove his SUV over a small car containing a 16 year old high school junior girl who was a member of the National Honor Society and had dreams of becoming a Doctor. The mangled remains of her car told the story of a society gone soft on crime, and hard on the victims. There would be no more studies for this young lady, and her family would never mend. The man driving the SUV was arrested at the scene of the accident; tested and found to have a blood alcohol content four times the legal limit, and not a scratch on him.

In an office in Phoenix, Arizona, Jonas Wright read his newspaper. Wright, a stock broker who owns his own business, reddens in his face as he reads the headline. HOME OWNER FOUND GUILTY OF HOME DEFENSE SHOOTING IN MISSOURI. “How in the hell can you find someone guilty of shooting an intruder in your own home?” he demands of his secretary, Shelly Walters.

“What are you talking about, Jonas?”

Jonas holds the paper for her to see. “See, right here! This piece of scum broke into this guy’s house in the middle of the night, and was shot inside the home! He wasn’t killed, and he brought attempted murder charges against the home owner, and the guy was found guilty! How does that happen?”

Shelly looks at the paper, shrugs her shoulders and said, “That’s the way things are, nowadays. The laws are made by the lawyers to protect the criminals. There’s more money in that than protecting the regular people.”

Furious without knowing quite why he was so angry, Jonas crumples the paper and tosses it aside. “You’re dead right, Shelly. Laws are for the honest people to follow at the risk of having crap like this happen to them. America has been overrun with bleeding heart liberals who see the good in every crook, and see the normal people as a population to extort money out of all the while continuing to sponge off the taxpayers. I am so sick of this! Washington is filled with crooks, sleazebags, and lifelong politicians who want nothing more than to continue to take money from everyone, for as long as they can. Why can’t we find someone honest enough and strong enough to stand up and say, enough! We are taking back our country from the lawyers, crooks, and politicians! Taking back the money we give to all the other countries that screw us left and right, while they keep taking the handouts from the crooks in Washington who cut deal after deal with them, and get rich off of both sides!”

Shelly looked at Jonas, and said, “Jonas, we’ve had this talk before. Nobody wants to stand up to the establishment. Nobody can, unless they are squeaky clean, and have a ton of money. Do you know anybody like that? Oh, I do. You! Why wait around for someone else to do it? Maybe you ought to stand up and say it. You’ve got respect in this town; you’ve always done things the right way, and never cut any corners that I know of. Maybe you are the man for the job.”

Jonas thought about that for a moment. Shelly was right; they had talked like this before, but he had never come to any decision, just pissed and moaned like he was doing now. What if he did try to do something? How would he go about it? “Shelly, do you really think that I could do something? Or are you just giving me crap to shut me up?”

Shelly looked him in the eye for a moment, and then shrugged her shoulders and replied “Who knows? Somebody needs to. Lord knows, the politicians these days are the biggest crooks there are, and the people never get an honest person to run long enough to vote for. But, if there were someone who ran, and had the backing to make a serious stab at something, then yes, I think you could be that person. And maybe you could change America if you were to go about it in the right way. People are fed up with politicians, government, and the court system. America is broken, and we just blithely go along with whatever Washington feeds us. Sure, we bitch and moan about it, but who really does anything about it? No one, that’s who. No one has had the gumption to stand up and say “Rally around me, America! I am here to help you take back America!” We need that person, and I think you have the ability to be that leader.”

Jonas sat back in his chair, and thought hard about this. If he really wanted to do this, it would take some serious planning and time. “And tons of money” he said to himself. But where to begin? Shaking his head, he put it on the back burner for now, and turned to start his day.

Two weeks later, he was reading the paper again, when he saw the headline. “Oil Prices Drop Below $80.00 Per Barrel For First Time In Two Years”. In reading the article, Jonas saw that, regardless of the drop in crude oil, the gas prices were not going to drop, because the Oil Giants “had to maintain the price in order to allow their shareholders an opportunity to recoup their money, and the expectation that the price of crude was going to rise again in the coming months”. The article went on to say that the current administration was going to allow the price to remain high at the pumps, because the American people were “accustomed to the price”, and to change it might de-stabilize the economy as it currently was.

“What a load of horseshit!!” Jonas exploded after reading the article. “How can our government continue to allow those bastards to rape the American public, and not do anything about it? They just admitted to holding the price of gas high, even though there is no reason in the world to keep it there!”

Shelly listened to her boss’s rant, and responded, “It’s like you always say, because they can. Hell, Jonas, there’s not a soul living in Washington who has the country’s best interests at heart; you know that as well as I do. There won’t be, either, unless someone challenges the old guard to stop taking bribes and kickbacks, to quit looking out only for themselves and their buddies, and to start to look out for the little people. We have the rich getting richer off the disappearing middle class; and we have a growing group of people who don’t, won’t, or can’t work at all. They have the bleeding hearts in D.C. giving them more and more money to stay at home and have more illegitimate kids in order to continue to receive the votes that keep them in office. Do you know that I saw an article a while back about a young unmarried black woman in Chicago, who was in her early twenties or so, and was in the hospital having her eighth kid! Her eighth! When she was asked by a nurse if she was aware she could get assistance in not getting pregnant, she told the nurse that her grandma had told her she was the breadwinner in the family, and it was her job to have more babies so they could get more government assistance. She was getting about $150,000.00 a year to stay home, get pregnant, and have more kids! Something is so wrong in America, and I don’t begin to know what to do to make it right. But I think the first step is someone like you Jonas; someone who’s not afraid to challenge people to do something, anything, to make a change in a different direction. You, Jonas; you’re who America needs.”

Jonas just looked at her for a few seconds while somewhere in the back of his mind he was thinking that maybe, just maybe, he could try this. God, what a hill to climb, but maybe it was possible. Coming to a decision, he said “Shelly, call my attorney. Get him here first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll do it. But I can’t do it alone. I’ll need more help than I can think of; more than I have close at hand. And get my brother Caleb here, too. I’ll definitely need his help. Thanks, Shelly; you just helped to make my mind up for me. I hope we both don’t end up regretting this somewhere down the road.”

Well, what do you think? Are you in agreement: should Jonas run for President? Or should he just retire and keep his mouth shut?